'Non-binary is someone who doesn't feel Male or female'
Well yes, except the truth is, hardly anyone does. It's a very normal feeling, that has been pathologised.
I’d love to live in a world where men could wear dresses, skirts, make up, without fear and just be men.
I’d love women to be as butch or masculine as they like, or reject make up and socially constructed feminine roles and not be ostracised for it and still be women.
But many organisations (like Stonewall, political parties who have embraced all of this, journalists who write about it etc) who look as though they are deconstructing gender, are actually reinforcing it.
They are going along with a society that has decided that feminine men are probably actually women, and masculine women are probably really men.
And so now you now have young people left right and centre, who thirty years ago, were just blokes wearing a bit of lippy and eyeliner, identifying as non-binary rather than open themselves up to violence. (and I am separating enbys from transsexuals, which is slightly different; genuine gender dysphoria is mercifully, very rare).
Thirty years ago, loads of people messed around with gender norms, because it was allowed. Now isn’t.
Gender is more fiercely policed than at any other time in recent history and we are all the poorer for it. We are being forced into ever smaller boxes labelled masculine and feminine, and if any of us believe we don’t belong in those boxes, or reject the boxes, then there are loads more newly invented boxes to shove us into.
I have every sympathy with young people who decide that they are non-binary rather than negotiate a world that tells them that they have to be one thing or the other.
But the new choices they are being given, aren’t really choices at all; they are socially sanctioned boxes that they may step into, with permission. Because if they don’t, ostracization and violence wait the other side.
Enter Sam Smith, Asia Argento, Ruby Rose, and numerous other personalities, choosing to 'soft trans' rather than be ostracised or subject to homophobia.
Society is perfectly happy with the ‘new’ version of 'soft' trans, part of the widened trans umbrella, that truth be told, incorporates pretty much everyone.
They love it, because it upholds all the gender norms. There is nothing progressive about a society where your choices are Masculine, Feminine or Trans. However, it’s far less of a threat to Patriarchy than a genuinely progressive society, where you have Men, Women, a small number of people who are Intersex, and everyone can be anything they want to be, wear anything they want, and access the full gamut of human emotions and experiences open to us.
That doesn’t serve the Patriarchy at all as it interferes with their ability to keep women ‘less than’, and their ability to push out feminine men from the ‘Man Box’ into…well, let’s face it, they don’t really care where they go, so long as they don’t taint the current prescribed version of masculinity with their girly nonsense!
So Sam Smith, who just wants to wear pretty clothes and nice shoes, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, by the way, finds it easier to legitimise what he sees as his feminine side, by calling it his 'female' side and coming out as non-binary.
Despite all the horror statistics we hear about suicide and murder (which is awful and partially true) and despite the fact that the UK is still a pretty safe place to be trans, for Sam Smith, as a white man in the West, it is still actually safer at the moment for him to come out as trans than live openly as a very camp gay man.
They don't talk about 'transing away the gay' for nothing. The world we live in is horrifically homophobic (and I believe strongly that transphobia is just an offshoot of homophobia) so while I truly think 'non-binary' is at best, pathologised personality and at worst an annoying affectation, I get why young gay or lesbian adolescents and young people are grabbing it with both hands.